The Thin Line

by Arja Salafranca

Arja Salafranca is an accomplished writer, having twice won the Sanlam Literary Award in South Africa. The stories in her new book engage and reel in the reader on that ‘thin line’ from the start. The carefully drawn characters are haunting: Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, and poor skinny Mark, as he sees his love teeter away from him.’Ten Minutes to Hate’ tells of an armed robbery in a packed theatre, and its effect, emotionally and psychologically, on two of the people involved. ‘Collage’ is the story of a possessive love so fierce, that only death can resolve it. Searingly honest, sometimes painfully so.

£31.00

About the author

Arja Salafranca

Arja
Salafranca has published three collections of poetry, A Life Stripped
of Illusions, which received the Sanlam Award for poetry, The Fire in
which we Burn; and Beyond Touch (2015) which was a co-winner of the SALA
Awards. Her fiction has been published online, in anthologies and
journals, and is collected in her debut collection, The Thin Line, long
listed for the Wole Soyinka Award. She has participated in a number of
writers’ conferences, edited two anthologies and has received awards for
her poetry and fiction. Her next book is a collection of creative
non-fiction essays, travel writing, personal essays and journal entries,
to be published by Modjaji in 2019. She lives in Johannesburg.

Review

‘These stories chart a new direction in South African fiction, where each line, each page – each story unfolds subtly, reaching deeper and more intimately into the tender spaces that exist in all our lives between love and doubt. Reading them kept me up late at night, wanting to know more about the characters’ lives. I was enthralled by the clarity and compassion of her insights; and moved by her obvious love for our fragile country and the fierce power of our unrelinquished hopes.’

Hamilton Wende author of ‘House of War’